171. Maroon Communities: The History of Black Brilliance and Freedom with Dr. Crystal Menzies

 
 
 
 

Expanding History

There is so much history that we don’t learn in school.

History that isn’t prioritized by educational systems, history that is deliberately hidden by systems of white supremacy.

Colonial and white supremacist historical narratives rarely acknowledge the history of Black resistance and rebellion, or the free Black communities created by Maroons, some of which still exist to this day.

Dr. Crystal Menzies joins Erica to discuss the past and present of Maroon communities, what they have to teach us about communal care and collective responsibility, and why we need accessible, intergenerational education.

Listen on your favorite podcast player or keep reading to learn:

  • The history of Maroon communities and how they sustain their cultures to this day

  • How Maroon communities implement communal care and accountability

  • Why we need to learn about the resistance and rebellion of Black people

  • Why education needs to be intergenerational and in community


Centering the Black Experience

A former educator in urban schools, Dr. Crystal Menzies drew on her personal experience, African-Diasporan history, and her Guyanese and African American roots to found EmancipatED where she develops research-based educational experiences that center Black communities.

In her flagship product, she draws on the stories of Maroon communities – Africans who freed themselves from slavery and created hidden societies – to offer Black and Brown families a model for how to navigate as liberated beings within oppressive systems. She lives in the Bay Area (or the Yay area as she affectionately refers to it) and enjoys reading, Marvel movies, and daydreaming of Black Futures.

Free Black Societies

On the Pause on the Play® podcast, Dr. Crystal Menzies (she/her) explains that Maroon communities were, and are, free rebel Black societies that existed throughout the Americas. She says that these self-emancipated groups existed anywhere that enslavement existed, from the United States, through Mexico and Central America, and into Brazil and other parts of South America, and ranged in size up to thousands of people.

And these communities still exist. Dr. Menzies mentions communities in Jamaica and Colombia that have sustained themselves for centuries.

Erica says that so often for Black communities, they had to “not only create it, but sustain it, and as much as possible shield it from being ripped away from us,” as with incidents like the Tulsa Massacre on Black Wall Street.

She asks Dr. Menzies if Maroon communities have acclimated over the years to white structures or if they have largely remained self-sustained and intentionally unintegrated.

Dr. Menzies says that it’s a spectrum. “Fundamentally, they love the culture they’ve created. And there is still a distrust of the larger culture…And there is some, like I’ll go to school and become a lawyer so I can become a better advocate for my community.”

She continues, “There’s some dipping back and forth. Go to your schools and institutions and live in my community and make sure we preserve what we have. Because in many ways, the values may not consistently align, and they wanna make sure they preserve those values.”

As an example, she says that in Jamaica, she’ll often hear of members of Maroon communities who left for jobs or other opportunities, “so there is that kind of emigration that happens too, for Maroon peoples, but then they typically will often have some type of family or community still.”

How Maroon Communities Sustained Themselves

Dr. Menzies says that one of the key ways Maroon communities have sustained themselves is through geographic isolation and protection. Communities were established in places “that they could use the land to their benefit. And then self-defense goes hand in hand with that.”

She says that during the Jamaican Maroon communities’ war for independence from the British, “Queen Nanny was known for camouflage and training her troops to hide in the jungle without being seen until it was too late.” 

She also says that Maroon communities would pretend to capitulate to colonial powers, but then do something else completely different. “Playing colonial powers was a big part of this as well.”

Because of the Maroons' use of their intelligence and innovation in fighting colonial powers, Dr. Menzies says that, “their societies were seen as an existential threat to plantation society. If your whole system is structured off of, these people are born to be in servitude…and then you have people living free and using their ingenuity to continue to live free–it’s a threat to everything you’ve created.”

Loosely quoting a Voodoo practitioner featured in the documentary In Search of Voodoo: Roots to Heaven, Dr. Menzies says that “African people are people who add on, and we adapt, and that’s why our culture is so vibrant and consistently is so vibrant. And it made me think exactly of Maroons.”

Erica says that Black spiritual practices are a perfect example of that adding on and adapting. “To have an entire group of people that had their culture ripped away from them and then be told to adopt Christianity when they didn’t want it. And yet, they took that and adopted it in their own way, in order to maintain their spiritual practices.”

To this day, Erica says, “Hoodoo and Voodoo are two things that are so often vilified and not understood. And these were simply ways that people tried to keep what was theirs, when so much of what was theirs was taken away.”

Dr. Menzies adds that “Spirituality and kinship is how their communities were organized. And typically, especially back in the day, the Maroon leaders were both spiritual and military leaders because they couldn’t do the work they were doing, the work of being free people, without a connection to a deeper source.”

Teaching Resistance and Rebellion

Dr. Menzies says that she first encountered the existence and history of Maroon communities when she was in college at Spelman College. She says Spelman, “really expanded my view of Blackness, Black womanhood, Black femininity, Black personhood.”

But she remembers being angry that she got to college without learning about the Maroons, and wondered if she hadn’t gone to an HBCU, if she ever would have learned about them.

She went on to become a US History teacher, and while teaching about enslavement, she realized that it was vital to teach her students about Black resistance and rebellion.

And she was written up for it because “it wasn’t a high priority.” She also suspects the administration didn’t want her “rile up” her students.

“I was the direct recipient of a system that didn’t want me to teach certain things.”

That experience prompted her to enter nonprofit education reform, but in that space she “met people who were using amazing rhetoric, like liberatory rhetoric…[but it was] weaponizing of the language of Black liberation. And then I felt stuck. How can I attempt to be a liberated being in the midst of these oppressive systems?”

She realized that she needed to create a framework for how to operate as a free people within an oppressive system. 

“And so I created an entire framework, like how does one even become a Maroon? What kind of mindset do you need to have? What kind of awareness do you need to have? What are the active steps to liberation?”

The problem was, as a friend pointed out to her, that most people had no idea who the Maroons are.

So, “the first step is just sharing these stories. This is who Maroons are. This is how they maintain their freedom, or attempted to maintain their freedom. And this is what we could learn from them.”

Intergenerational Education

Sharing those stories, Erica says, “does fall on those of us that have children…[or] are a part of their learning and their exposure and their rearing. And it is up to us to give them these things that otherwise they don’t get.”

Which is why resources like the ones Dr. Menzies has created through EmancipatED are so important.

Dr. Menzies says that when she has been asked to do DEI work, she noticed at first that she was good at telling people what not to do, “but because they had no other schema, no other way of knowing, they always reverted back to the old…And I realized showing them, here’s another way to do things, here are other stories and narratives that we can learn from, actually helped a lot in those spaces.”

Her work through EmancipatED, “is not like a traditional curriculum. I didn’t wanna position the caregiver as the all-knower who’s teaching a young person something. We are learning together.”

Dr. Menzies adds that learning together extends beyond the immediate family and into community and extended kinship networks, in what she refers to as intergenerational education.

Multiple generations can learn together and from each other, with intention. “We are engaging with these stories of Maroonage, and now we’re also sharing our own stories and our own learnings and interpretations.”

She continues, “something that stood out to me in the Maroon communities that still exist is the role of the elder in the community.”

She says that, for example, in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, there is no police force. “Their community is one of communal care and communal accountability…And if there is some beef, it’s typically an elder, or someone with respected status, who comes in and mediates the situation through dialogue. Because they’ve seen it all before.”

She continues, that the way that our individualistic, capitalistic society has us moving all the time, and distancing ourselves from our communities of origin, results in “losing a lot of our stories and our knowledge. And I wanted to try to bring some of that back to us through these stories of Maroonage. Because we all have these stories of resistance within our families, and don’t even know.”

Systems of Communal Care

Erica asks if there are particular practices that Maroon communities have that foster a balance between the individual and the collective. 

Dr. Menzies says that a common thread is communal care. “Take care of each other, take care of each other’s children.”

There are also two significant group structures that exist in San Basilio de Palenque.

El Kuagro groups people by age. Those within that age-based clan have responsibilities to each other and to the community. “Like if you’re in financial distress, you’re supposed to be able to go to your El Kuagro, and your El Kuagro is going to help you.”

The larger system of communal care chooses a leader, but the leader can only make decisions with group agreement. “It is very much a direct democracy…They were very clear to say [that] this is a tedious thing. It’s not simple, even though they’ve been doing it for hundreds of years, especially decision making for the entire community.”

They are also intentional about building relationships outside of their family units.

“People who know you and know your family, and we know there’s accountability built in, how are they gonna navigate when they know [that] other people know [that] you know, we’re gonna hold you accountable to things.”

Making the Maroons’ History Accessible

Dr. Menzies says she created the EmancipatED Experience because “I believe at my core that I’ve been put on this earth to get these stories out there in a way that’s accessible. Because there is material on Maroons, but it’s for college kids and graduate students and you’d have to know to even look for it.”

She continues, “The colonial project is one of forgetting and one of erasure.”

Paraphrasing Angela Davis, she says, “Radicalism is simply grasping at the root.” And, “I needed something to grasp on my journey because I felt hopeless. But then I remembered, or re-remembered, wait, there’s people who have already done this and people who are already doing it, what can I learn from them?”

Erica adds, “I think that’s the challenge. You don't know what to grasp and where to grasp it from. And there is a point that it’s like, the being untethered just lets our soul, our spirit feel like it’s the balloon that a child accidentally released and you can’t get it back. And you’re trying to figure out, how do I hold this just tightly enough where I don’t suffocate it, but enough that it knows, you have a home.”

She continues that learning about the history of Maroon communities, “has me excited. Like, ooh, that’s us. That’s me. That’s part of my history, my heritage. And when you feel like you don’t have that, that is a very fulfilling and self-soothing and soul-holding thing.”

Dr. Menzies says, “I see people, we’re grasping for things. It’s like we want something to hold onto, but what is it? And what is it that’s not rooted in whiteness? I think just bring it back home is the key. And home as far as not just our family unit…but our extended kinship networks. And what does love and responsibility and relationship look like with each other, that’s rooted in liberation. Then from there, radiate that out.”

To that end, she suggests reaching out to elders in your community and asking them for their stories.

“There’s always been times of social upheaval. And there’s more upheaval at deeper levels. Ask them how their community navigated that space and what we could learn from them.”

Ready to Dive Deeper?

Pause on the Play, The Community was created as a space to be able to share information, to allow people to connect with one another, to amplify what is important to them, and support one another in becoming the change that we want to create.

In the community, we have conversations where you learn about something that you were unaware of, and how you can shift what’s possible, what can come up in the future if you allow yourself to dream a little bit bigger, to be willing to listen a little bit more intently.

If you would like to be a part of these conversations, if you would like to be in a room with other people that are values-aligned and looking to reconsider their normals, this is the place for you.

Learn more at  pauseontheplay.com/community

Connect with Dr. Crystal Menzies


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